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While one of The Who’s first hit singles, I Can See for Miles, was most certainly not about data visualization, it still might – – on a bit of a stretch – – find a fitting a new context in describing one of the latest dazzling new technologies in the opening stanza’s declaration “there’s magic in my eye”. In determining Who’s who and what’s what about all this, let’s have a look at report on a new tool enabling data scientists to indeed “see for miles and miles” in an exciting new manner.

This innovative approach was recently the subject of a fascinating article by an augmented reality (AR) designer named Benjamin Resnick about his team’s work at IBM on a project called Immersive Insights, entitled Visualizing High Dimensional Data In Augmented Reality, posted on July 3, 2017 on Medium.com. (Also embedded is a very cool video of a demo of this system.) They are applying AR’s rapidly advancing technology1 to display, interpret and leverage insights gained from business data. I highly recommend reading this in its entirety. I will summarize and annotate it here and then pose a few real-world questions of my own.

Immersive Insights into Where the Data-Points Point

As Resnick foresees such a system in several years, a user will start his or her workday by donning their AR glasses and viewing a “sea of gently glowing, colored orbs”, each of which visually displays their business’s big data sets2. The user will be able to “reach out select that data” which, in turn, will generate additional details on a nearby monitor. Thus, the user can efficiently track their data in an “aesthetically pleasing” and practical display.

The project team’s key objective is to provide a means to visualize and sum up the key “relationships in the data”. In the short-term, the team is aiming Immersive Insights towards data scientists who are facile coders, enabling them to visualize, using AR’s capabilities upon time series, geographical and networked data. For their long-term goals, they are planning to expand the range of Immersive Insight’s applicability to the work of business analysts.

For example, Instacart, a same-day food delivery service, maintains an open source data set on food purchases (accessible here). Every consumer represents a data-point wherein they can be expressed as a “list of purchased products” from among 50,000 possible items.

How can this sizable pool of data be better understood and the deeper relationships within it be extracted and understood? Traditionally, data scientists create a “matrix of 2D scatter plots” in their efforts to intuit connections in the information’s attributes. However, for those sets with many attributes, this methodology does not scale well.

Consequently, Resnick’s team has been using their own new approach to:

Lower complex data to just three dimensions in order to sum up key relationships

Visualize the data by applying their Immersive Insights application, and

“Iteratively label and color-code the data” in conjunction with an “evolving understanding” of its inner workings

Their results have enable them to “validate hypotheses more quickly” and establish a sense about the relationships within the data sets. As well, their system was built to permit users to employ a number of versatile data analysis programming languages.

The types of data sets being used here are likewise deployed in training machine learning systems3. As a result, the potential exists for these three technologies to become complementary and mutually supportive in identifying and understanding relationships within the data as well as deriving any “black box predictive models”.4

Analyzing the Instacart Data Set: Food for Thought

Passing over the more technical details provided on the creation of team’s demo in the video (linked above), and next turning to the results of the visualizations, their findings included:

A great deal of the variance in Instacart’s customers’ “purchasing patterns” was between those who bought “premium items” and those who chose less expensive “versions of similar items”. In turn, this difference has “meaningful implications” in the company’s “marketing, promotion and recommendation strategies”.

Among all food categories, produce was clearly the leader. Nearly all customers buy it.

When the users were categorized by the “most common department” they patronized, they were “not linearly separable”. This is, in terms of purchasing patterns, this “categorization” missed most of the variance in the system’s three main components (described above).

Resnick concludes that the three cornerstone technologies of Immersive Insights – – big data, augmented reality and machine learning – – are individually and in complementary combinations “disruptive” and, as such, will affect the “future of business and society”.

Questions

Can this system be used on a real-time basis? Can it be configured to handle changing data sets in volatile business markets where there are significant changes within short time periods that may affect time-sensitive decisions?

Would web metrics be a worthwhile application, perhaps as an add-on module to a service such as Google Analytics?

Is Immersive Insights limited only to business data or can it be adapted to less commercial or non-profit ventures to gain insights into processes that might affect high-level decision-making?

Is this system extensible enough so that it will likely end up finding unintended and productive uses that its designers and engineers never could have anticipated? For example, might it be helpful to juries in cases involving technically or financially complex matters such as intellectual property or antitrust?

2. See the Subway Fold category of Big Data and Analytics for other posts covering a range of applications in this field.

3. See the Subway Fold category of Smart Systems for other posts on developments in artificial intelligence, machine learning and expert systems.

4. For a highly informative and insightful examination of this phenomenon where data scientists on occasion are not exactly sure about how AI and machine learning systems produce their results, I suggest a click-through and reading of The Dark Secret at the Heart of AI, by Will Knight, which was published in the May/June 2017 issue of MIT Technology Review.

Fast forward thirteen years to a recent article entitled Exoskin: A Programmable Hybrid Shape-Changing Material, by Evan Ackerman, posted on IEEE Spectrum on June 3, 2016. This is about an all-new and entirely different development, quite separate from quantum dots, but nonetheless a current variation on the concept that matter can be programmed for new applications. While we always think of programming as involving systems and software, this new story takes and literally stretches this long-established process into some entirely new directions.

I highly recommend reading this most interesting report in its entirety and viewing the two short video demos embedded within it. I will summarize and annotate it, and then pose several questions of my own on this, well, matter. I also think it fits in well with these 10 Subway Fold posts on other recent developments in material science including, among others, such way cool stuff as Q-Carbon, self-healing concrete and metamaterials.

Matter of Fact

The science of programmable matter is still in its formative stages. The Tangible Media Group at MIT Media Lab is currently working on this challenge included in its scores of imaginative projects. A student pursuing his Master’s Degree in this group is Basheer Tome. Among his current research projects, he is working on a type of programmable material he calls “Exoskin” which he describes as “membrane-backed rigid material”. It is composed of “tessellated triangles of firm silicone mounted on top of a stack of flexible silicone bladders”. By inflating these bladders in specific ways, Exoskin can change its shape in reaction to the user’s touch. This activity can, in turn, be used to relay information and “change functionality”.

Although this might sound a bit abstract, the two accompanying videos make the Exoskin’s operations quite clear. For example, it can be applied to a steering wheel which, through “tactile feedback”, can inform the driver about direction-finding using GPS navigation and other relevant driving data. This is intended to lower driver distractions and “simplify previously complex multitasking” behind the wheel.

The Exoskin, in part, by its very nature makes use of haptics (using touch as a form of interface). One of the advantages of this approach is that it enables “fast reflexive motor responses to stimuli”. Moreover, the Exoskin actually involves inputs that “are both highly tactily perceptible and visually interpretable”.

Fabrication Issues

A gap still exists between the current prototype and a commercially viable product in the future in terms of the user’s degree of “granular control” over the Exoskin. The number of “bladders” underneath the rigid top materials will play a key role in this. Under existing fabrication methods, multiple bladders in certain configurations are “not practical” at this time.

However, this restriction might be changing. Soon it may be possible to produce bladders for each “individual Exoskin element” rather than a single bladder for all of them. (Again, the videos present this.) This would involve a system of “reversible electrolysis” that alternatively separates water into hydrogen and oxygen and then back again into water. Other options to solve this fabrication issue are also under consideration.

Mt. Tome hopes this line of research disrupts the distinction between what is “rigid and soft” as well as “animate and inanimate” to inspire Human-Computer Interaction researchers at MIT to create “more interfaces using physical materials”.

My Questions

In what other fields might this technology find viable applications? What about medicine, architecture, education and online gaming just to begin?

Might Exoskin present new opportunities to enhance users’ experience with the current and future releases virtual reality and augmented reality systems? (These 15 Subway Fold posts cover a sampling of trends and developments in VR and AR.)

How might such an Exoskin-embedded steering wheel possibly improve drivers’ and riders’ experiences with Uber and other ride-sharing services?

The third of the band’s classic singles can be stretched a bit to be used as a helpful metaphor to describe an emerging form pervasive “all around”-edness, this time in a more technological context. Upon reading a fascinating recent article on TechCrunch.com entitled The Next Stop on the Road to Revolution is Ambient Intelligence, by Gary Grossman, on May 7, 2016, you will find a compelling (but not too rocking) analysis about how the rapidly expanding universe of digital intelligent systems wired into our daily routines is becoming more ubiquitous, unavoidable and ambient each day.

All around indeed. Just as romance can dramatically affect our actions and perspectives, studies now likewise indicate that the relentless global spread of smarter – – and soon thereafter still smarter – – technologies is comparably affecting people’s lives at many different levels.²

I will summarize and annotate it, add some additional context, and then pose some of my own Trogg-inspired questions.

Internet of Experiences

Digital this, that and everything is everywhere in today’s world. There is a surging confluence of connected personal and business devices, the Internet, and the Internet of Things (I0T)³.Woven closely together on a global scale, we have essentially built “a digital intelligence network that transcends all that has gone before”. In some cases, this quantum of advanced technologies gains the “ability to sense, predict and respond to our needs”, and is becoming part of everyone’s “natural behaviors”.

A forth industrial revolution might even manifest itself in the form of machine intelligence whereby we will interact with the “always-on, interconnected world of things”. As a result, the Internet may become characterized more by experiences where users will converse with ambient intelligent systems everywhere. The supporting planks of this new paradigm include:

A prediction of what more fully realized ambient intelligence might look like using travel as an example appeared in an article entitled Gearing Up for Ambient Intelligence, by Lisa Morgan, on InformationWeek.com on March 14, 2016. Upon leaving his or her plane, the traveler will receive a welcoming message and a request to proceed to the curb to retrieve their luggage. Upon reaching curbside, a self-driving car6 will be waiting with information about the hotel booked for the stay.

Listening

Another article about ambient intelligence entitled Towards a World of Ambient Computing, by Simon Bisson, posted on ZDNet.com on February 14, 2014, is briefly quoted for the line “We will talk, and the world will answer”, to illustrate the point that current technology will be morphing into something in the future that would be nearly unrecognizable today. Grossman’s article proceeds to survey a series of commercial technologies recently brought to market as components of a fuller ambient intelligence that will “understand what we are asking” and provide responsive information.

Will it be long before we begin to see similar smart devices everywhere in homes and businesses?

Kevin Kelly, the founding Executive Editor of WIRED and a renowned futurist7, believes that in the near future, digital intelligence will become available in the form of a utility8 and, as he puts it “IQ as a service”. This is already being done by Google, Amazon, IBM and Microsoft who are providing open access to sections of their AI coding.9 He believes that success for the next round of startups will go to those who enhance and transforms something already in existence with the addition of AI. The best example of this is once again self-driving cars.

As well, in a chapter on Ambient Computing from a report by Deloitte UK entitled Tech Trends 2015, it was noted that some products were engineering ambient intelligence into their products as a means to remain competitive.

Recommending

A great deal of AI is founded upon the collection of big data from online searching, the use of apps and the IoT. This universe of information supports neural networks learn from repeated behaviors including people’s responses and interests. In turn, it provides a basis for “deep learning-derived personalized information and services” that can, in turn, derive “increasingly educated guesses with any given content”.

Bots are another contemporary manifestation of ambient intelligence. These are a form of software agent, driven by algorithms, that can independently perform a range of sophisticated tasks. Two examples include:

Optimally, bots should also be able to listen and “speak” back in return much like a 2-way phone conversation. This would also add much-needed context, more natural interactions and “help to refine understanding” to these human/machine exchanges. Such conversations would “become an intelligent and ambient part” of daily life.

An example of this development path is evident in Google Now. This service combines voice search with predictive analytics to present users with information prior to searching. It is an attempt to create an “omniscient assistant” that can reply to any request for information “including those you haven’t thought of yet”.

The configurations and specs of AI-powered devices, be it lapel pins, some form of augmented reality10 headsets or something else altogether, supporting such pervasive and ambient intelligence are not exactly clear yet. Their development and introduction will take time but remain inevitable.

Will ambient intelligence make our lives any better? It remains to be seen, but it is probably a viable means to handle some of more our ordinary daily tasks. It will likely “fade into the fabric of daily life” and be readily accessible everywhere.

Quite possibly then, the world will truly become a better place to live upon the arrival of ambient intelligence-enabled ocarina solos.

My Questions

Does the emergence of ambient intelligence, in fact, signal the arrival of a genuine fourth industrial revolution or is this all just a semantic tool to characterize a broader spectrum of smarter technologies?

How might this trend also effect non-commercial spheres such as public interest causes and political movements?

As ambient intelligence insinuates itself deeper into our online worlds, will this become a principal driver of new entrepreneurial opportunities for startups? Will ambient intelligence itself provide new tools for startups to launch and thrive?

Back in the halcyon days of yore before the advent of smartphones and WiFi, there were payphones and phone booths all over of the streets in New York. Most have disappeared, but a few scattered survivors have still managed to hang on. An article entitled And Then There Were Four: Phone Booths Saved on Upper West Side Sidewalks, by Corey Kilgannon, posted on NYTimes.com on February 10, 2016, recounts the stories of some of the last lonely public phones.

Taking their place comes a highly innovative new program called LinkNYC (also @LinkNYC and #LinkNYC). This initiative has just begun to roll out across all five boroughs with a network of what will become thousands of WiFi kiosks providing free and way fast free web access and phone calling, plus a host of other online NYC support services. The kiosks occupy the same physical spaces as the previous payphones.

The first batch of them has started to appear along Third Avenue in Manhattan. I took the photos accompanying this post of one kiosk at the corner of 14th Street and Third Avenue. While standing there, I was able to connect to the web on my phone and try out some of the LinkNYC functions. My reaction: This is very cool beans!

LinkNYC also presents some potentially great new opportunities for marketers. The launch of the program and the companies getting into it on the ground floor were covered in a terrific new article on AdWeek.com on February 15, 2015 entitled What It Means for Consumers and Brands That New York Is Becoming a ‘Smart City’, by Janet Stilson. I recommend reading it in its entirety. I will summarize and annotate it to add some additional context, and pose some of my own ad-free questions.

LinkNYC Set to Proliferate Across NYC

Link.NYC WiFi Kiosk 2, Image by Alan Rothman

When completed, LinkNYC will give New York a highly advanced mobile network spanning the entire city. Moreover, it will help to transform it into a very well-wired “smart city“.¹ That is, an urban area comprehensively collecting, analyzing and optimizing vast quantities of data generated by a wide array of sensors and other technologies. It is a network and a host of network effects where a city learns about itself and leverages this knowledge for multiple benefits for it citizenry.²

According to Mike Gamaroff, the head of innovation in the New York office of Kinetic Active a global media and marketing firm, LinkNYC is primarily a “utility” for New Yorkers as well as “an advertising network”. Its throughput rates are at gigabit speeds thereby making it the fastest web access available when compared to large commercial ISP’s average rates of merely 20 to 30 megabits.

Nick Cardillicchio, a strategic account manager at Civiq Smartscapes, the designer and manufacturer of the LinkNYC kiosks, said that LinkNYC is the only place where consumers can access the Net at such speeds. For the AdWeek.com article, he took the writer, Janet Stilson, on a tour of the kiosks include the one at Third Avenue and 14th Street, where one of the first ones is in place. (Coincidentally, this is the same kiosk I photographed for this post.)

There are a total of 16 currently operational for the initial testing. The WiFi web access is accessible with 150 feet of the kiosk and can range up to 400 feet. Perhaps those New Yorkers actually living within this range will soon no longer need their commercial ISPs.

Link.NYC WiFi Kiosk 4, Image by Alan Rothman

The initial advertisers appearing in rotation on the large digital screen include Poland Spring (see the photo at the right), MillerCoors, Pager and Citibank. Eventually “smaller tablet screens” will be added to enable users to make free domestic voice or video calls. As well, they will present maps, local activities and emergency information in and about NYC. Users will also be able to charge up their mobile devices.

However, it is still too soon to assess and quantify the actual impact on such providers. According to David Krupp, CEO, North America, for Kinetic, neither Poland Spring nor MillerCoors has produced an adequate amount of data to yet analyze their respective LinkNYC ad campaigns. (Kinetic is involved in supporting marketing activities.)

Commercializing the Kiosks

The organization managing LinkNYC, the CityBridge consortium (consisting of Qualcomm, Intersection, and Civiq Smartscapes) , is not yet indicating when the new network will progress into a more “commercial stage”. However, once the network is fully implemented with the next few years, the number of kiosks might end up being somewhere between 75,000 and 10,000. That would make it the largest such network in the world.

CityBridge is also in charge of all the network’s advertising sales. These revenues will be split with the city. Under the 12-year contract now in place, this arrangement is predicted to produce $500M for NYC, with positive cash flow anticipated within 5 years. Brad Gleeson, the chief commercial officer at Civiq, said this project depends upon the degree to which LinkNYC is “embraced by Madison Avenue” and the time need for the network to reach “critical mass”.

Because of the breadth and complexity of this project, achieving this inflection point will be quite challenging according to David Etherington, the chief strategy officer at Intersection. He expressed his firm’s “dreams and aspirations” for LinkNYC, including providing advertisers with “greater strategic and creative flexibility”, offering such capabilities as:

Dayparting – dividing a day’s advertising into several segments dependent on a range of factors about the intended audience, and

Hypertargeting – delivering advertising to very highly defined segments of an audience

Barry Frey, the president and CEO of the Digital Place-based Advertising Association, was also along for the tour of the new kiosks on Third Avenue. He was “impressed” by the capability it will offer advertisers to “co-locate their signs and fund services to the public” for such services as free WiFi and long-distance calling.

Poland Spring is now running a 5-week campaign featuring a digital ad (as seen in the third photo above). It relies upon “the brand’s popularity in New York”.

Capturing and Interpreting the Network’s Data

Link.NYC WiFi Kiosk 1, Image by Alan Rothman

Thus far, LinkNYC has been “a little vague” about its methods for capturing the network’s data, but has said that it will maintain the privacy of all consumers’ information. One source has indicated that LinkNYC will collect, among other points “age, gender and behavioral data”. As well, the kiosks can track mobile devices within its variably 150 to 400 WiFi foot radius to ascertain the length of time a user stops by. Third-party data is also being added to “round out the information”.³

Some industry experts’ expectations of the value and applications of this data include:

Helma Larkin, the CEO of Posterscope, a New York based firm specializing in “out-of- home communications (OOH)“, believes that LinkNYC is an entirely “new out-of-home medium”. This is because the data it will generate “will enhance the media itself”. The LinkNYC initiative presents an opportunity to build this network “from the ground up”. It will also create an opportunity to develop data about its own audience.

David Krupp of Kinetic thinks that data that will be generated will be quite meaningful insofar as producing a “more hypertargeted connection to consumers”.

Other US and International Smart City Initiatives

Currently in the US, there is nothing else yet approaching the scale of LinkNYC. Nonetheless, Kansas City is now developing a “smaller advertiser-supported network of kiosks” with wireless support from Sprint. Other cities are also working on smart city projects. Civiq is now in discussions with about 20 of them.

Internationally, Rio de Janeiro is working on a smart city program in conjunction with the 2016 Olympics. This project is being supported by Renato Lucio de Castro, a consultant on smart city projects. (Here is a brief video of him describing this undertaking.)

A key challenge facing all smart city projects is finding officials in local governments who likewise have the enthusiasm for efforts like LinkNYC. Michael Lake, the CEO of Leading Cities, a firm that help cities with smart city projects, believes that programs such as LinkNYC will “continue to catch on” because of the additional security benefits they provide and the revenues they can generate.

My Questions

Should domestic and international smart cities to cooperate to share their resources, know-how and experience for each other’s mutual benefit? Might this in some small way help to promote urban growth and development on a more cooperative global scale?

Should LinkNYC also consider offering civic support services such as voter registration or transportation scheduling apps as well as charitable functions where pedestrians can donate to local causes?

February 19, 2017 Update: For the latest status report on LinkNYC nearly a year after this post was first uploaded, please see After Controversy, LinkNYC Finds Its Niche, by Gerald Schifman, on CrainsNewYork.com, dated February 15, 2017.

1. While Googling “smart cities” might nearly cause the Earth to shift off its axis with its resulting 70 million hits, I suggest reading a very informative and timely feature from the December 11, 2015 edition of The Wall Street Journal entitled As World Crowds In, Cities Become Digital Laboratories, by Robert Lee Hotz.

2. Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia (W. W. Norton & Company, 2013), by Anthony M. Townsend, is a deep and wide book-length exploration of how big data and analytics are being deployed in large urban areas by local governments and independent citizens. I very highly recommend reading this fascinating exploration of the nearly limitless possibilities for smart cities.

These items just in from the Pop Culture Department: It would seem nearly impossible to film an entire movie thriller about a series of events centered around a public phone, but a movie called – – not so surprisingly – – Phone Booth managed to do this quite effectively in 2002. It stared Colin Farrell, Kiefer Sutherland and Forest Whitaker. Imho, it is still worth seeing.

Furthermore, speaking of Kiefer Sutherland, Fox announced on January 15, 2016 that it will be making 24: Legacy, a complete reboot of the 24 franchise, this time without him playing Jack Bauer. Rather, they have cast Corey Hawkins in the lead role. Hawkins can now be seen doing an excellent job playing Heath on season 6 of The Walking Dead. Watch out Grimes Gang, here comes Negan!!

Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote his immortal classic poem, The Charge of the Light Brigade, in 1854. It was to honor the dead heroes of a doomed infantry charge at the Battle of Balaclava during the Crimean War. Moreover, it strikingly portrayed the horrors of war. In just six short verses, he created a monumental work that has endured ever since for 162 years.

The poem came to mind last week after reading two recent articles on seemingly disparate topics. The first was posted on The New Yorker’s website on December 30, 2015 entitled In Silicon Valley Now, It’s Almost Always Winner Takes All by Om Malik. This is highly insightful analysis of how and why tech giants such as Google in search, Facebook in social networking, and Uber in transportation, have come to dominate their markets. In essence, competition is a fierce and relentless battle in the global digital economy. The second was an article on CNET.com posted on December 23, 2015 entitled Chip Promises Faster Computing with Light, Not Electrical Wires by Stephan Shankland. I highly recommend reading both of them in their entirety.

Taken together, the homonym of “light” both in historical poetry and in tech, seems to tie these two posted pieces together insofar as contemporary competition in tech markets is often described in military terms and metaphors. Focusing on that second story here for purposes of this blog post, about a tantalizing advance in chip design and fabrication, will this survive as it moves forward into the brutal and relentlessly “winner takes all” marketplace? I will summarize and annotate this story, and pose some of my own, hopefully en-light-ening questions.

This approach, according to Wikipedia, of “using silicon as an optical medium”, is called silicon photonics. IBM (see this link) and Intel (see this link) have likewise been involved in R&D in this field, but have yet to introduce anything ready for the market.

However, this team of university researchers believes their new approach might be introduced commercially within a year. While their efforts do not make chips run faster per se, the photonic elements “keep chips supplied with data” which avoids them having to lose time by idling. Thus, they can process data faster.

Currently (no pun intended), electrical signals traverse metal wiring across the world on computing and communications devices and networks. For data traveling greater national and international distances, the electronic signals are transposed into light and sent along on high-speed fiber-optic cables. Nonetheless, this approach “isn’t cheap”.

Half a League Onward

What the university researchers’ team has done is create chips with “photonic components” built into them. If they succeed in scaling-up and commercializing their creation, consumers will be likely the beneficiaries. These advantages will probably manifest themselves first when used in data centers that, in turn, could speed up:

Remove processing bottlenecks and conserve battery life in smartphones and other personal computing platforms

Professor Stojanovic believes that one of their largest challenges if is to make this technology affordable before it can be later implemented in consumer level computing and communications devices. He is sanguine that such economies of scale can be reached. He anticipates further applications of this technology to enable chips’ onboard processing and memory components to communicate directly with each other.

Additional integrations of silicon photonics might be seen in the lidar remote sensing systems for self-driving cars¹, as well as brain imaging² and environmental sensors. It also holds the potential to alter the traditional methods that computers are assembled. For example, the length of cables is limited to the extent that data can pass through them quickly and efficiently before needed amplification along the way. Optical links may permit data to be transferred significant further along network cabling. The research team’s “prototype used 10-meter optical links”, but Professor Stojanovic believes this could eventually be lengthened to a kilometer. This could potentially result in meaningful savings in energy, hardware and processing efficiency.

Two startups that are also presently working in the silicon photonics space include:

What other new markets, technologies and opportunities for entrepreneurs and researchers might emerge if the university research team’s chips achieve their intended goals and succeed in making it to market?

Got to classes. Sit through a series of 50 minute lectures. Drink coffee. Pay attention and take notes. Drink more coffee. Go to the library to study, do research and complete assignments. Rinse and repeat for the rest of the semester. Then take your final exams and hope that you passed everything. More or less, things have traditionally been this way in college since Hector was a pup.

The story was covered in a fascinating report that appeared on December 8, 2015 on the website of the Chronicle of Higher Education entitled Virtual-Reality Lab Explores New Kinds of Immersive Learning, by Ellen Wexler. I highly recommend reading this in its entirety as well as clicking on the Augmentarium link to learn about some these remarkable projects. I also suggest checking out the hashtag #Augmentarium on Twitter the very latest news and developments. I will summarize and annotate this story, and pose some of my own questions right after I take off my own imaginary VR headset.

Developing VR Apps in the Augmentarium

In 2014, Brendan Iribe, the co-founder of the VR headset company Oculus², as well as a University of Maryland alumni, donated $31 million to the University for its development of VR technology³. During the same year, with addition funding obtained from the National Science Foundation, the Augmentarium was built. Currently, researchers at the facility are working on applications of VR to “health care, public safety, and education”.

Professor Ramani Duraiswami, a PhD and co-founder of a startup called VisiSonics (developers of 3D audio and VR gaming systems), is involved with the Augmentarium. His work is in the area of audio, which he believes has a great effect upon how people perceive the world around them. He further thinks that an audio or video lecture presented via distance learning can be greatly enhanced by using VR to, in his words make “the experience feel more immersive”. He feels this would make you feel as though you are in the very presence of the instructor4.

During a recent showcase there, Professor Duraiswami demo-ed 3D sound5 and a short VR science fiction production called Fixing Incus. (This link is meant to be played on a smartphone that is then embedded within a VR viewer/headset.) This implementation showed the audience what it was like to be immersed into a virtual environment where, when they moved their heads and line of sight, what they were viewing corresponding and seamlessly changed.

Enhancing Virtual Immersions for Medicine and Education

Amitabh Varshney, the Director of the University’s Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, is now researching “how the brain processes information in immersive environments” and how is differs from how this is done on a computer screen.6 He believes that VR applications in the classroom will enable students to immerse themselves in their subjects, such as being able to “walk through buildings they design” and “explore” them beyond “just the equations” involved in creating these structures.

At the lab’s recent showcase, he provided the visitors with (non-VR) 3D glasses and presented “an immersive video of a surgical procedure”. He drew the audience’s attention to the doctors at the operating table who were “crowing around” it. He believes that the use of 3D headsets would provide medical students a better means to “move around” and get an improved sense of what this experience is actually like in the operating room. (The September 22, 2015 Subway Fold post entitled VR in the OR: New Virtual Reality System for Planning, Practicing and Assisting in Surgery is also on point and provides extended coverage on this topic.)

While today’s early iterations of VR headsets (either available now or early in 2016), are “cumbersome”, researchers hope that they will evolve (in a manner similar to mobile phones which, in turn and as mentioned above, are presently a key element in VR viewers), and be applied in “hospitals, grocery stores and classrooms”. Director Varshney can see them possibly developing along an even faster timeline.

My Questions

Is the establishment and operation of the Augmentarium a model that other universities should consider as a means to train students in this field, attract donations, and incubate potential VR and AR startups?

What entrepreneurial opportunities might exist for consulting, engineering and tech firms to set up comparable development labs at other schools and in private industry?

What other types of academic courses would benefit from VR and AR support? Could students now use these technologies to create or support their academic projects? What sort of grading standards might be applied to them?

Do the rapidly expanding markets for VR and AR require that some group in academia and/or the government establish technical and perhaps even ethical standards for such labs and their projects?

How are relevant potential intellectual property and technology transfer issues going to be negotiated, arbitrated and litigated if needed?

1. Btw, has anyone ever figured out how the very elusive and mysterious “To Be Announced (TBA)”, the professor who appears in nearly all course catalogs, ends up teaching so many subjects at so many schools at the same time? He or she must have an incredibly busy schedule.

There is an old joke that goes something like this: What do you get for the man who has everything and then where would he put it all?¹This often comes to mind whenever I have experienced the sensation of information overload caused by too much content presented from too many sources. Especially since the advent of the Web, almost everyone I know has also experienced the same overwhelming experience whenever the amount of information they are inundated with everyday seems increasingly difficult to parse, comprehend and retain.

The multitudes of screens, platforms, websites, newsfeeds, social media posts, emails, tweets, blogs, Post-Its, newsletters, videos, print publications of all types, just to name a few, are relentlessly updated and uploaded globally and 24/7. Nonetheless, for each of us on an individualized basis, a good deal of the substance conveyed by this quantum of bits and ocean of ink somehow still manages to stick somewhere in our brains.

So, how does the human brain accomplish this?

Less Than 1% of the Data

A recent advancement covered in a fascinating report on Phys.org on December 15, 2015 entitled Researchers Demonstrate How the Brain Can Handle So Much Data, by Tara La Bouff describes the latest research into how this happens. I will summarize and annotate this, and pose a few organic material-based questions of my own.

To begin, people learn to identify objects and variations of them rather quickly. For example, a letter of the alphabet, no matter the font or an individual regardless of their clothing and grooming, are always recognizable. We can also identify objects even if the view of them is quite limited. This neurological processing proceeds reliably and accurately moment-by-moment during our lives.

Dr. Vempala believes that the reason why humans can quickly make sense of the very complex and robust world is because, as he observes “It’s a computational problem”. His colleagues and team members examined “human performance in ‘random projection tests'”. These measure the degree to which we learn to identify an object. In their work, they showed their test subjects “original, abstract images” and then asked them if they could identify them once again although using a much smaller segment of the image. This led to one of their two principal discoveries that the test subjects required only 0.15% of the data to repeat their identifications.

Algorithmic Agility

In the next phase of their work, the researchers prepared and applied an algorithm to enable computers (running a simple neural network, software capable of imitating very basic human learning characteristics), to undertake the same tasks. These digital counterparts “performed as well as humans”. In turn, the results of this research provided new insight into human learning.

The team’s objective was to devise a “mathematical definition” of typical and non-typical inputs. Next, they wanted to “predict which data” would be the most challenging for the test subjects and computers to learn. As it turned out, they each performed with nearly equal results. Moreover, these results proved that “data will be the hardest to learn over time” can be predicted.

In testing their theory, the team prepared 3 different groups of abstract images of merely 150 pixels each. (See the Phys.org link above containing these images.) Next, they drew up “small sketches” of them. The full image was shown to the test subjects for 10 seconds. Next they were shown 16 of the random sketches. Dr. Vempala of the team was “surprised by how close the performance was” of the humans and the neural network.

While the researchers cannot yet say with certainty that “random projection”, such as was demonstrated in their work, happens within our brains, the results lend support that it might be a “plausible explanation” for this phenomenon.

My Questions

Might this research have any implications and/or applications in virtual reality and augment reality systems that rely on both human vision and processing large quantities of data to generate their virtual imagery? (These 13 Subway Fold posts cover a wide range of trends and applications in VR and AR.)

Might this research also have any implications and/or applications in medical imaging and interpretation since this science also relies on visual recognition and continual learning?

What other markets, professions, universities and consultancies might be able to turn these findings into new entrepreneurial and scientific opportunities?

1.I was unable to definitively source this online but I recall that I may have heard it from the comedian Steven Wright. Please let me know if you are aware of its origin.